Yammer

Microsoft announced an impressive enterprise social media integration at the 2014 SharePoint Conference that should serve to enhance productivity for Office 365 users. Microsoft is calling this feature “Document Conversations”.

Document Conversations leverages the power of Yammer to allow users to share ideas and input on a document without leaving the application. Of course, since this is powered by Yammer, users can join a conversation via anywhere a Yammer feed is embedded.

This is how Microsoft describes it on their Office Blog:

Here’s how document conversations work. When you open a file in your browser from your cloud store, you see the file on the left with a contextual Yammer conversation in a pane on the right. You can collapse and expand the Yammer pane as needed.

You can do more than join in a conversation from the Yammer pane. You can also post a message, @mention your coworkers, and publish to a Yammer group—either public or private.

Document conversations are easy to join in Yammer as well. If you’re working in Yammer, you’ll see a threaded conversation in the group the post was published in with an icon that enables you to open the file from the cloud location where it lives. The Yammer conversations about files are visible to users in the group but only users who have permission to view or edit the file can open it.

To get a better feel for what this will look like in practice, you may wish to view this short video:

So what do you think? Will this help or hurt productivity? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.